88 So Why did Comey Write the Comey Letter?
I would say It remains the crucial unanswered question of the 2016 election, except that it’s barely been asked. Unasked-I would guess-because any attempt to answer it is too embarrassing to both James Comey’s FBI AND Dean Baquet’s MSM.
Of course, Apuzzo leaves out his own role in this. And right off the bat he continues to repeat things he reported back in that July, 2015 that weren’t true then and are even less true now.
Way back in March 2017-after Comey finally acknowledged the existence of the Russia investigation after nine months-as opposed to Emailgate which was leaked before it was even opened-see Chapter A-Kevin Drum put the question pretty well:
“Once again: Clinton did nothing particularly wrong in her campaign. She didn’t ignore working-class whites. She wasn’t too cautious on policy. She didn’t overestimate the impact of educated voters. She wasn’t complacent. What happened was simple: 12 days before the election, the FBI director released a letter saying he had found a brand-new trove of emails and implying that this might finally be the smoking gun about her private email server. That’s it.”
“We’ll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he’s terminally stupid and didn’t realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that’s why Donald Trump is president.”
The only part I would quibble with is the idea that we will never know-we need to know.
In many ways what the FBI did in the 2016 election was just as outrageous as what Russia did. In some ways more-it’s a greater betrayal as what would we expect from Putin? Here’s a guy who stole his own election so not surprising he’d try-ultimately successfully-to steal ours. But for our top domestic intelligence agency to engage in such conduct is more than appalling.
So it is simply imperative that we know-this is not something that can be rabbit holed-like so many things have been from Bush-Gore 2000 to Nixon colluding with South Vietnam to steal the 1968 election, to Reagan-Bush colluding with Iran to steal the 1980 election to what really happened on 9/11-starting from Cheney’s standdown order-to, heck, who really killed JFK.
For those who want us to “move on” there is no moving on without closure and there is no closure without the truth-the first step to actual accountability.
FN: See Chapter No Moving On
For Comey to keep repeating it was a choice between “very bad” and “cataclysmic” is rich as what his Comey Letter is one of the most cataclysmic decisions in American history in terms of its ill effects.
So we must have an accounting. To be sure, Michael Horowitz was supposed to provide this accounting.
In January, 2017 Michael Horowitz’s IG was commissioned to answer this very question. This, of course, came in the final days of the Obama Administration. Wether or not this investigation would be allowed to be completed-and its findings released when Trump begun his illegitimate regime was the disquieting question that certainly I had from that moment on. And 51 months later the answer was clear: it wouldn’t be allowed. But Horowitz would wait for the Biden years to table the report on the leaking rogue anti Hillary agents forever.
FN: See Chapter Horowitz
In this chapter we will look at a number of theories as to why Comey did his Comey Letter hereby electing the candidate Comey knew was a national counterintelligence risk.
Comey’s own explanation of October 28, 2016 does nothing but beg more questions-every time you hear him speak about it it’s even more grating as it doesn’t answer the questions but raises more.
UPDATE: Here was Comey in December 2018 before the GOP Congress-though he has offered similar kinds of rationalizations a number of times post 2016:
Pg. 97
This is not accurate-he didn’t know it was no longer true at most that it might not be. At least before they reviewed the emails they couldn’t know it was untrue and a subsequent review-that didn’t take nearly as long as the Emailgate team claimed it would-how they get it this wrong is another very interesting question-and so there was no duty to correct-which in any case wouldn’t have superseded the Hatch Act and the DOJ practice of defnitively not effecting an election.
Hearing Comey “explain” October 28, 2016-a day which will live in infamy-is fingers on the chalkboard as it’s so full of errors and non sequitors that don’t even pass the laugh test. For starters he didn’t “know it was a lie”-as we’ll look at in more detail below he didn’t even know what was in the emails yet-and it was pretty obvious all along that they were likely duplicates…
Then there are his weird premises that don’t pass the laugh test like “reveal or conceal”, “very bad vs cataclysmic” and destroying the legacy of the FBI. I mean true story, I ran in the 2018 Democratic primary for the NY2 Congressional district seat-Peter King’s old seat. Long story short I got some bad advice and left the primary early-after a pretty good first debate-I was conned into getting out to endorse DuWanyne Gregory-who had lost by 25 points to King in 2016 but was still the choice of the corrupt LI Democratic machine-on the premise that he was the only candidate who could beat Peter King-despite him losing by 25 points to him two years earlier. Then Gregory wasn’t even able to win the primary.
FN: The premise was that he could get the Black vote because-he’s Black, while Liuba Grechen Shirley-a White woman-couldn’t energize the AA community. Yet she would end up beating him by close to 20 points-apparently the AA community wasn’t so energized by him either.
For her part, Grechen Shirley came closer to defeating King than anyone had since he won his first race in 1992; she might have won with any support from Rich Schaffer’s corrupt political machine.
Or for that matter from Mike Bloomberg
As she revealed, not only had he not donated to her-despite his supposedly having changed to a Democrat-but he was donating to the GOP.
End FN
Anyway when I was running my dream was-obviously winning the election-but then getting to Congress and having Comey testify-presumably he’d do it voluntarily? He’s always been eager to pontificate in public before…
My first question to him would have been the “very bad vs cataclysmic” canard: “Director Comey” I would ask him. “Do you still believe your choice was merely very bad? Because many see where we are today as what’s cataclysmic, indeed as the true “500 year flood.”
But until now even Comey’s worst critics have tended to give him the benefit of the doubt. In the opinion of this chapter they’ve been far too charitable. But the idea that he made the least worse, least “cataclysmic” choice doesn’t come close to passing the proverbial laugh test.
Although I wouldn’t exactly call Apuzzo a Comey critic-he offers some nominal theater criticism of him in this NYT article but in reality he’s not a Comey critic he’s yet another Comey apologist. As almost all who have criticized Comey’s Emailgate boondoggle in any way Apuzzo presumes Comey’s good faith.
Of course, it’s not too surprising Apuzzo ends up as Comey’s apologist-as the Savvy NYT reporter also needs his own apologists for his own bad Emailgate reporting-in many ways this bad reporting lit the match of this faux scandal that elected the Illegtimate One leading our country to a dumpster fire we have still far from extinguished.
Savvy MSM journalists tend to engage in apologetics for Comey as they also need apologetics for themselves. So right off the bat, Apuzzo attempts to relitigate his bad reporting that started this whole cataclysmic-to use Comey’s word-mess were are still going through now.
“The F.B.I.’s involvement with Mrs. Clinton’s emails began in July 2015 when it received a letter from the inspector general for the intelligence community. The letter said that classified information had been found on Mrs. Clinton’s home email server, which she had used as secretary of state. The secret email setup was already proving to be a damaging issue in her presidential campaign.”
Of course, Apuzzo leaves out his own role in this. And right off the bat he continues to repeat things he reported back in that July, 2015 that weren’t true then and are even less true now.
Mr. Comey’s deputies quickly concluded that there was reasonable evidence that a crime may have occurred in the way classified materials were handled, and that the F.B.I. had to investigate. “We knew as an organization that we didn’t have a choice,” said John Giacalone, a former mob investigator who had risen to become the F.B.I.’s top national security official.”
This has the convenience of being patently false, as we saw in Chapter No Probable Cause there never was sufficient probable cause.
“On July 10, 2015, the F.B.I. opened a criminal investigation, code-named “Midyear,” into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information. The Midyear team included two dozen investigators led by a senior analyst and by an experienced F.B.I. supervisor, Peter Strzok, a former Army officer who had worked on some of the most secretive investigations in recent years involving Russian and Chinese espionage.”
“There was controversy almost immediately.”
“Responding to questions from The Times, the Justice Department confirmed that it had received a criminal referral — the first step toward a criminal investigation — over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information.”
“But the next morning, the department revised its statement.”
“The department has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information,” the new statement read. “It is not a criminal referral.”
Again he abstracts out his role-it was his reporting and there’s a pretty strong case he moved his trigger finger too quickly on this story just as his “senior official” at the DOJ certainly moved too quickly to confirm it-again see Chapter No Probable Cause.
But more importantly is the issue of “matter vs criminal investigation” which 20 months later, Apuzzuo still doesn’t get.
“At the F.B.I., this was a distinction without a difference: Despite what officials said in public, agents had been alerted to mishandled classified information and in response, records show, had opened a full criminal investigation.”
This is not a distinction without a difference-as we saw in Chapter No Probable Cause 811s rarely lead to criminal investigations. There is before the law a very big distinction-that Comey-Giaccolone and Friends pretended there was no distinction speaks volumes.
The Justice Department knew a criminal investigation was underway, but officials said they were being technically accurate about the nature of the referral. Some at the F.B.I. suspected that Democratic appointees were playing semantic games to help Mrs. Clinton, who immediately seized on the statement to play down the issue. “It is not a criminal investigation,” she said, incorrectly. “It is a security review.”
No-as we saw in Chapter No Probable Cause Hillary was not incorrect, and it’s notable that even looking back Apuzzo continued to be incorrect 20 months after his initial erroneous reporting.
It’s widely believed that the rogue NY FBI anti Clinton haters forced Comey’s hand. I believe this myself though I don’t agree with the Comey defenders who believe this somehow mitigates Comey’s abuse of power-as we noted in chapter Fake Russian Doc the answer isn’t to pay the ransomers.
A March 2017 Vanity Fair article suggested Comey was concerned about his own legacy.
After Hillary lost, Bill Clinton summed up what many Democrats and even some Republicans still believe: “James Comey cost her the election.”
Just days before her defeat, an open letter circulated among former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials accusing Comey of unprecedented actions that had left them “astonished and perplexed”—as well as angry. “In our network, we are sad,” says the former Southern District attorney. “He was an American hero. Now who knows how he will go down in history?”
“He left himself completely exposed to charges that he acted in a way that affected the outcome of a political election,” says someone who was close to the e-mail investigation. “It has affected the reputation of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. in ways that are profound and will take years to comprehend.”
“It was a mistake of world-historic proportions,” argues another person, who was close to events.
He certainly has a legacy now-of course so did J Edgar Hoover, Ken Starr, and Louis Freeh. Chris Christie has a legacy-of egregious abuse of his power while letting his flunkies go to prison for crimes committed at his direction. Comey’s legacy is “a mistake of world-historic proportions”-except it was far from his only mistake.
But again even his toughest critics have given him the benefit of the doubt.
Was Comey’s October announcement a naked political gambit, planned in collusion with the Trump campaign and Republican operatives? None of the people I spoke with who had worked for Comey or knew him well believe this, not even those who are infuriated by his actions. A former Southern District prosecutor, who is extremely critical of what Comey did, says, “There is no one in the world that I think is less likely to do something for a bad reason than Jim Comey.”
This facile assumption of Comey’s having no intentions less than as pure as the driven snow is very widely held-but this chapter will argue this almost universal assumption is overly hasty.
Another theory was put forward in an Atlantic post by Adam Serwer where Comey wrote the Comey Letter because he feared being impeached.
“In his accounts of his decision to notify Congress that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails had been reopened in the waning days of the 2016 election, former FBI Director James Comey has always said he was trying to protect the FBI, despite the personal sacrifice that might entail.”
“I knew this would be disastrous for me personally, but I thought this is the best way to protect these institutions that we care so much about,” Comey testified before Congress in May 2017. In his memoir, A Higher Loyalty, Comey wrote that he and the leadership at the FBI “kept coming down to the same place: the credibility of the institutions of justice was at stake.” In an op-ed written Thursday for The New York Times, Comey declared that “My team believed the damage of concealing the reopening of our investigation would have been catastrophic to the institution.”
But an internal Justice Department inquiry suggests Comey was also thinking of something else: keeping his job.
“The Department of Justice inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, released Thursday, includes multiple interviews that suggest Comey feared that failing to inform Congress that the FBI had potentially discovered messages relevant to the investigation was not “survivable,” that he might be “impeached,” should Congress discover after the fact that the investigation had been reopened during the election. That account is starkly at odds with the image that Comey himself has tried to cultivate, as a selfless public servant who was acting solely in the interest of the institutions he served. But in the recollections of top officials at the FBI and Justice Department, Comey wasn’t just worried about the damage to the Bureau, but also concerned about his ability to remain FBI director.”
It’s certainly plausible the Trey Gowdy cum Devin Nunes House would have impeached Comey had they known about Huma’s emails “somehow” showing up on Weiner’s laptop.
FN: Indeed they did know-perhaps they learned of it even before Comey himself see Chapter Devin Nunes
Not that this impeachment would have any basis-but that wouldn’t have stopped them. Of course wether Comey did the Comey Letter because he was concerned for the FBI’s legacy and/or to avoid impeachment it was still wrong. His concern should have been for following the rules and precedents of the DOJ which dictates to say nothing this close to the election. To be sure the canard about the legacy of the FBI is particularly rich as no one has done more to destroy it’s legacy-such as it was-than Comey’s entire Emailgate boondoggle.
Notably, the IG investigation also found something of a divide regarding Comey’s motivations-DOJ officials and FBI people seem to “remember it differently.”
Rybicki told the IG “that he did not ‘remember using that language,’” and current FBI Deputy Director James Bowdich similarly said that “he did not recall Comey making that comment,” telling investigators that “I remember him pointing and saying I am going to suffer personally from this as well. But he felt it was the right decision to make.”
However, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch told investigators that she recalled Axelrod contemporaneously informing her that Comey “was concerned that if, if in fact he did not provide this information to Congress, and either it was leaked or later on we discussed it in some Department-approved way, that it was not survivable. And that was the phrase that was given to us.” Lynch’s deputy Sally Yates also told investigators that “she remembered ‘being told that FBI doesn’t think it’s survivable for the Director for him not to’ notify Congress. Yates stated that one of the reasons that the FBI ‘gave for why they felt like [Comey] had to go to Congress is that they felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether he advised Congress or not.’”
FN: Again it’s important to understand and fully appreciate that by then it had already in fact leaked-the entire GOP Congressional leadership if not the entire GOP Congressional membership knew about the emails. But as Nunes said on Fox-they couldn’t publicly reveal what the knew without Comey making his statement. But the October Surprise wasn’t a surprise to the GOP Congress. in Chapter Devin Nunes I make the point that it wasn’t in their interest to reveal it at that time.
These accounts suggest a divide in recollections. Department of Justice officials seem to recall fairly clearly being informed that Comey was concerned about his own “survivability” should Congress discover that the FBI reopened the Clinton investigation without disclosing that they had done so. FBI officials close to Comey told the IG that they didn’t remember Comey saying that.”
James Baker is the one former FBI official-former as Trump drummed him out-who recalls Comey being concerned with losing his job.
But the account offered by James Baker, the former FBI chief counsel and a close adviser to Comey, breaks that pattern. Baker told investigators that “I think [Comey] may have said like I could be impeached” or “something along those lines.” Asked to elaborate, Baker said that at some point during the discussions over how the handle the Clinton email inquiry “he raised, I don’t remember the context exactly. He raised the issue of, you know, potentially he could get impeached for this if he doesn’t tell them this.” Congress has the power to remove officials by means of impeachment and trial; some members of the Republican majorities were quite vocal, during the 2016 campaign, in their criticisms of Comey’s handling of the Clinton probe.”
Is it that the officials over at Trumpland the FBI “remember it differently” or are they pretending not to remember? With their track record and the track record of Emailgate this question is more than fair.
As noted above, Horowitz waited for the Biden years to reveal that he was shelving the report on the leaks of the rogue anti Clinton agents forever. This is an investigation that began in January, 2017 before Trump was sworn in and then again and again was lapped by parallel investigations demanded by Trump and the GOP co-conspirators-into Andy McCabe, Comey himself, the Steele Dossier…
Still the IG did put out the first half that dealt with Comey’s ad hockery-the IG calls him insubordinate. He certainly is that among many other choice words.
FN: To underscore the extent that Horowitz prioritized investigations Trump wanted over those he didn’t, even in releasing part one of the report, the report led with the whole faux scandal of Peter Strozk and Lisa Page.
End FN
Pg. 400
I certainly agree with much of this. It’s undeniable that he “failed to give adequate consideration” to long established DOJ and FBI policies-that he was happy to follow when it suited him-like when the Republican candidate for President’s campaign was under investigation. Impossible to disagree that he made a serious error of judgment. As the IG itself argues elsewhere, the main reason he found his choices difficult was because he chose to substitute his own moral ad hockery for clearly established rules and precedents. Had he done this it wouldn’t have been difficult at all. As the IG points out in this scenario it would hardly have been the “catastrophe” Comey allegedly fretted about.
EW’s point-that Horowitz may know the truth about the motivation of the leakers perhaps goes better following the IG passage. FN: Does this point belong here? Link?
UPDATE: It’s also good to see them knock down Comey’s rationalizations on the wildly disparate treatment of the Emailgate and Russian Collusion investigations
Indeed. In the alternative universe where Comey did no Comey Letter it would have been very easy for him.
Indeed it would have been particularly easy as in this world-the world we actually live in-there was nothing in the emails found on Weiner’s laptop-which was clearly the most likely outcome all along-as many of Comey’s agents on Emailgate themselves admitted though we’re getting ahead of ourselves. But even if there was something-it was never very likely there was something that would have changed the decision not to indict Clinton-he would have had a clear conscience as that’s DOJ policy. As long as they didn’t bury them and got a search warrant in a timely manner where would the problem be?
FN: Although to the extent it was likely most of these emails were duplicates the question begs once again: was there even probable cause in the first place? Which of course brings us full circle as this is the Original Sin of the entire Emailgate boondoggle-Chapter No Probable Cause.
OTOH while I agree with much of the IG assessment, I take issue with a couple of assertions.
“We found no evidence that Comey’s decision to send the October 28 letter
was influenced by political preferences.”
I’d be pretty interested to hear where they looked for such evidence-how exactly do you assess wether someone-someone leading an FBI investigation-is ‘influenced by political preferences?’
In the case of Peter Strozk-who was Trump-the Republican “President”-considered a political enemy all you needed was to rummage through his texts. But in the case of the rogue anti Clinton agents leaking to Barrett and Friends Horowitz didn’t even bother to see the texts
“In spite of the magnitude that these leaks had, Horowitz did not seize the FBI phones of the presumed leakers to find out what kind of damning texts they sent among themselves. This is a point made by NYCSouthpaw in a thread the day the report came out. The asymmetric focus on bias against Trump and not against Hillary is a real problem with this report.”
Similarly, in the case of Deputy Director Andy McCabe-who disagreed with Comey’s decision to do the Comey Letter-he was recused from the Comey Letter meeting-because his wife received donations as a Democrat. Comey felt that that was too much appearance of bias-for Clinton even though McCabe, like Comey himself, like Bob Mueller-was a life long Republican.
FN: See EW for more on the texts of the anti Clinton rogue agents
It’s not clear why having your wife receive donations from Democrats was enough to make you biased in favor of the Democrats even if you yourself are a life long Republican. But then the question no one has never asked is why by this logic, Comey himself shouldn’t have been recused-he was a lifelong Republican who donated to both of Obama’s Presidential opponents and spent 20 years investigating Hillary Clinton in one guise or another-and who sent Martha Stewart to prison for no good reason in 2001.
FN: Again we have so much to ‘thank’ Devlin Barrett for. It was he who published the hitjob against McCabe from the rogue FBI agents.
“On Friday, October 21, SDNY U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara tasked Joon Kim, the deputy US attorney in New York, to call Sally Yates, the Deputy Attorney General, and let her know about their agent’s concern that no one was following up on the Clinton e-mails. Yates referred Kim to George Toscas, the senior National Security Division Lawyer in the Attorney General’s office, who then contacted Peter Sztrok and Justice Department lawyer David Laufman to inquire about the matter.”
“By coincidence that same week, Barrett was working on a story about Andrew McCabe and had started asking questions concerning $675,288 in donations by The Virginia Democratic Party and Common Good CA, a political action committee run by Virginia Governor Terry McCauliffe, to McCabe’s wife Dr. Jill McCabe’s unsuccessful 2015 campaign for Virginia state senate. The genesis of this news story is something that Barrett does not reveal in his book, but it is actually more significant than the story itself. Apparently Barrett had heard from “a number of people inside the FBI” who were concerned that the donations to McCabe’s wife’s campaign created a conflict of interest for McCabe, even though the FBI’s top ethics official, Patrick Kelley, had determined that there was no problem since McCabe’s wife’s campaign had ended before McCabe was assigned responsibility for the Clinton e-mail case, and the connection to Clinton, via McCauliffe, the former chair of Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign was attenuated, at best. That there might be a few disgruntled FBI personnel eager to take digs at McCabe, an ambitious, rising star in the office, is hardly news. Most journalists would have dismissed the story as typical inter-office back-biting.”
“But not Barrett. The matter “didn’t sit well” with him. By complete coincidence, this minor, gossipy snipe against McCabe set Barrett off on a Proustian reverie that would have enormous consequences. When Barrett was young, he tells us, his mother also ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in New York. As he was only nine years old, he said he had paid little attention at the time.”
But I also remembered, years later when I was in high school, riding in her rusty Subaru sedan one day, she noticed a local businessman strolling down the sidewalk of out hometown. My mother sighed and reminisced about how the businessman had donated to her long-ago campaign. She not only remembered the donation, which was for no more than a few hundred dollars, but she still felt somewhat guilty about it, like she’d let him down.
Leaving aside the very remote likelihood that any person would actually have this sort of memory, the obvious differences between Barrett’s story and the McCabe situation seem not to have been noticed by the journalist. Yes, Barrett’s mother might have expressed pangs of regret upon the sight of a former donor. But would Barrett’s father have expressed similar feelings, not towards the donor himself, but towards a former boss of the donor to his wife’s campaign? That is the McCabe situation. If that type of attenuated Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon guilt by association is evidence of a disqualifying conflict of interest for a Deputy FBI Director, then good luck finding anyone in Washington to supervise an investigation of anyone else. (By way of comparison, try finding any sort of discussion about the obvious conflict of interest when a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals appointed Kenneth Starr in 1994 to investigate the suicide death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster and the Whitewater real estate investments of Bill Clinton. Starr had lost his job as Solicitor General, and a likely Supreme Court appointment, when Bill Clinton defeated his boss George H.W. Bush in 1992.) No, the real story was not the story about McCabe and any conflict of interest, it was that anyone would take seriously this type of phony allegation against McCabe. It was the very type of story that Barrett’s mentor Sandy Johnson had warned him about, a “false narrative” that was “hard to disprove or counter.”
In one sense, Barrett’s mawkish poise doesn’t even pass the laugh test-as Schoenberg argues if this principle were applied in a Kantian Universal way who wouldn’t be disqualified-just like if you wanted to ban all officials who use private email. As we saw above, this was the argument why Horowitz tabled the report on the rogue agents-there were too many of them.
But in a sense it’s no laughing matter-or the joke’s on us-as these absurd theatrics were used to force McCabe off the Emailgate decision-if there was any hope of preventing this monstrosity it would have been if McCabe and Lisa Page were in on it.
FN: I strongly suspect Comey knew this which is why he made sure they weren’t there. CF Schoenberg link
Then McCabe was fired for leaks-despite the IG refusing to look at the many leaks against Clinton. Basically, with all the leaks, only McCabe was punished-because he was on the wrong side of Trump after he fired Comey-of course, long before as a useful scapegoat-and if he’d had his way there would have been on Comey Letter and Trump would not have ‘won.’.
Speaking of undue political influence the IG report actually attempts to suggest Strozk was to blame for the missing month-the strange one month lag between when the FBI learned of the emails on Weiner’s laptop
Once again, another explanation for the Emailgate fiasco doesn’t even pass the laugh test. If Strozk’s evil genius strategy for helping Hillary win was to bury the emails until 12 days before the election it was a disastrous plan that achieved the opposite of his fiendish intentions.
Everyone acknowledges that had the emails been reported on say September 28 rather than October 28 of the 2016 election it would have had little impact. Even Comey himself allowed in his interview with the IG that had he known about it a month earlier-how exactly he didn’t know is another mystery wrapped inside an enigma of Emailgate-maybe he wouldn’t have done the Comey Letter.
So if ‘Strozk’s bias’ is to ‘thank’ for jamming the emails into the public 11 days before the election, it’s the GOP hacks-many in the FBI-who should be thanking him. Then again they should have thanked Comey but look what happened to him. So I question IG’s assertion Comey was not politically motivated as I don’t know how they attempted to corroborate or deny the idea. The other part of the IG’s Comey assessment I question is that a major factor was that Comey assumed Hillary would win:
“We found no evidence that Comey’s decision to send the October 28 letter was influenced by political preferences. Instead, we found that his decision was the result of several interrelated factors that were connected to his concern that failing to send the letter would harm the FBI and his ability to lead it, and his view that candidate Clinton was going to win the presidency and that she would be perceived to be an illegitimate president if the public first learned of the information after the election.”
I think here, Schoenberg is the one commentator who get closer to the truth:
“Comey explained to the Senate today that he was interested in those early e-mails because the FBI was still looking for evidence that Clinton intentionally set up her private server to violate the law. At one point during today’s testimony, Comey called that evidence “the golden missing e-mails,” as if they were searching for a prize in a chocolate bar. It was precisely the lack of any evidence of Clinton’s intent that Comey had relied on in July when he declared the investigation over.”
He mocks this belief in the “golden missing emails” as the Golden Ticket to Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
“When Comey and his investigative team held their “great debate” on October 27, did they even discuss whether there was probable cause? That’s something we don’t yet know. There is no good answer for Comey. If they didn’t even consider the issue, that’s pretty damning. If they did consider it, why did they get it wrong? Why did they think they’d find their Golden Ticket?”
“A lot of people have challenged me on this argument by saying that there had been probable cause all along. But that’s not true. This FBI investigation was not the result of the discovery of a crime, or a report from a victim. Rather, it was a referral from another branch of government to investigate whether there had even been a crime. The FBI should have been neutral on that question. But they weren’t. They got caught up in the endless Republican fishing expedition that set off the investigation, and were disappointed that they didn’t find what they were looking for. It never even occurred to Comey or his agents that Clinton might be innocent and that no crime had actually been committed. No, as I suggested already last November, they considered Clinton a criminal who had not yet been caught. And it is worth pointing out that until October 30, the FBI had not yet obtained a search warrant in the case. Until that time, it was just an ordinary investigation of public sources, department materials and cooperating witnesses.”
FN: They were disappointed to say the least-as we saw in Chapter B you had many senior FBI officials-many retired-threatening to release the emails on Weiner’s laptop to Julian Assange in October, 2016.
The more you learn about this entire Emailgate fiasco, the clearer it becomes that you can’t make any sense of it without the larger then 25 year context of the FBI’s Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome. As we see in Chapter The FBI is a Very Republican Place-the FBI’s Clinton Hatred goes back to the 1992 election-they were furious that Bill Clinton beat their man, George H.W. Bush. Indeed, these furious FBI agents (baselessly) believed along with the rest of the nation’s Republicans that somehow Clinton had stolen it from Bush-they had come to see the WH as the GOP’s birthright after 24 years of dominance.
Speaking of the disappointment in 2016 that Hillary-once again-wasn’t charged-recalls the disappointment they felt in the 1990s when she wasn’t charged in the fake Whitewater investigation. Indeed, a lot of (Savvy) folks-ie Beltway pundits-were shocked when Ken Starr took a diametrically opposed position during Trump’s impeachment than he did with Bill Clinton. But you were shocked only if you drank the savvy water. It should have been obvious that Starr’s Holy zeal investigating the Clintons was never principled but partisan.
Of course, for the Savvy pundits it wasn’t obvious at all. During the run up to Trump’s impeachment-back during the Mueller years when it was obvious Trump would eventually be impeached for something-though the Savvy pundits never discussed this for reasons of “American Exceptionalism”-they once again elevated Ken Starr to something of an honest broker. They acted as if he could tell us wether or not Trump needed to be impeached. It was obvious to me all along Starr would come out against impeaching Trump but of course not to them.
Starr-may he not rest in peace unless this isn’t what he wants-used the media’s elevation to write a book on his damnable Whitewater investigation.
I actually read it-or listened to it on Audiobooks. Keep your enemies closer… It wasn’t a very interesting book as he left out most of the truth-like when he locked Monica Lewinsky in a hotel rooms for 24 hours and threatened her and her mother with 27 years in prison if Lewinsky wouldn’t testify against Clinton.
FN: He touched on it but played Rush Limbaugh’s Club Gitmo defense. We were nice guys to give her a 24 hour all expenses paid stay at such a nice hotel.
It was even better than that-the crime this draconian sentence was supposedly based on was that for a crime she hadn’t yet done-they entrapped her into it. They wouldn’t allow her to call her lawyer and tell him not to send the letter they would use as a basis for perjury.
Most telling however, was chapter 22-Starr had to devote an entire chapter to explain his failure to indict HRC in 1998.
FN: Starting on pg 201.
I mean Starr wrote this 20 years later and you can still feel the palpable regret in his words-and no doubt the many fellow Hillary haters in Right wing law enforcement agencies-starting with the FBI
So when you understand why the rogue agents were so furious Comey didn’t indict her in 2016 either, it’s important to appreciate that in their minds this was happening again that woman had escaped their web again. Indeed, in retrospect it’s quite arguable, and in fact I will argue, that Martha Stewart was a sop to the Hillary Clinton haters-Comey sent her to prison despite her committing no crime as consolation gift to the Hillary haters. She had at least a superficial resemblance to Hillary-(too)smart, (too)ambitious, liberal, another uppity B-who was too big for her britches.
For his part, Schoenberg has focused on the warrant itself. He’s put forward lawsuits for information on the warrant itself but the FBI has resisted-leading him to rightly ask what is the FBI hiding?
As I argued above the FBI is hiding A LOT both here and in general.
It remains a question of what exactly the probable cause for the warrant to search the laptop was. True, a judge ultimately gave them their 11th hour warrant-but as Schoenblog argues by then what choice did this judge have? Few judges would be willing to buck the FBI with a case this hot at that late hour.
“It could be that Comey, like most Republicans, believed that there was a sufficient cloud of suspicion over Hillary Clinton to justify pretty much any investigation. Think of how the FBI might treat a notorious gangster like Al Capone. “Get me something on him! Anything!” the FBI director might tell his subordinates. That certainly seems to be how many in the FBI thought of Clinton, even after Comey had reported in July that there would be no prosecution. Some agents were already in open revolt over the e-mail probe three weeks prior to Comey’s surprise announcement. So maybe they never even thought much about the probable cause requirement, and perhaps the judge signed the search warrant, mindful of the intense public attention to the issue, without really considering the legal standard of whether the suspicions raised were reasonable.”
So maybe Comey did NOT have the expectation that Hillary would win at that point to the contrary as a life long Republican he assumed that Hillary Clinton was a criminal who had not yet been caught-a la Al Capone
FN: Many in the MSM also had that view of her in 2016. Paul Waldman made a similar point in the Spring of 2015 when the campaign was just beginning-the pundits believed the Clintons had gotten away with SOMETHING. Much of this was to rationalize all their crazed Whitewater coverage in the 1990s-a fake scandal built with lies upon lies upon more lies-Chapter A for more-as well as the then burgeoning hysteria over emails.
“I am focused on just one aspect of Comey’s legacy, namely his fateful decision on Thursday, October 27, 2016 to allow the FBI to obtain a search warrant to look at e-mails between Hillary Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin that were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. I have called this decision “the biggest mistake in the history of mistakes” and I still stand by that characterization. There is really no serious doubt that Comey’s decision changed the outcome of the election and helped elect Donald Trump. Benjamin Wittes has recently argued that the difference between Trump’s chances of winning, as calculated by Nate Silver, on October 27 (20%) and November 8 (28%), are too close to make that determination, but he doesn’t really grapple with the stats, and the fact that, according to Silver, Trump’s chances narrowed to as close as 35% on Sunday, November 6, when the FBI announced that the e-mail search revealed nothing incriminating. The predictors are of course imprecise, but the outcome of this particular election can be explained by the fact that, as my college friend Ed Glaser has argued, information travels less quickly in rural areas, like those in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Trump managed to hold on to a very, very narrow victory. Even with the FBI email debacle, had the election happened one or two days later, Clinton almost certainly would have won, as the public sentiment gradually returned to where it was on October 27.”
FN: Exactly-the timing of the Comey Letter’s release was literally perfect-which once again recalls Nance’s Law-“coincidences” take a lot of planning. The idea that this perfect timing was mere luck is hard to believe indeed.
The other reason that I focus on Comey’s mistake is that he has yet to admit he made a mistake. In fact, he continues to claim that if he had it to do all over again, he would make the same decision. “I am convinced that if I could do it all again, I would do the same thing, given my role and what I knew at the time.” (Page 207.) Many people have focused on the ridiculous “Speak or Conceal” dichotomy that Comey has set up in his mind to explain away his error. He seems simply incapable of applying the actual facts as they developed to help him see that a different, and very justifiable, decision would have been preferable. The most he offers is this:
Another person might have decided to wait to see what the investigators could see once they got a search warrant for the Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. That’s a tricky one, because the Midyear team [the FBI team working on the e-mails] was saying there was no way to complete the review before the election, but I could imagine another director deciding to gamble a bit by investigating secretly in the week before the election. That, of course, walks into Loretta Lynch’s point after our awkward hug. Had I not said something, what was the prospect of a leak during that week? Pretty high. Although the Midyear team had proven itself leakproof through a year of investigation, people in the criminal investigation section of the FBI in New York knew something was going on that touched Hillary Clinton, and a search warrant was a big step. The circle was now larger than it had ever been, and included New York, where we’d had Clinton-related leaks in prior months. Concealing the new investigation and then having it leak right before the election might have been even worse, if worse can be imagined. But a reasonable person might have done it.
Obviously, Comey is simply incapable of imagining the world as it would have been had he made a different choice. What could he possibly mean by “might have been even worse”? Worse than what actually transpired? Worse than his firing by President Trump? What exactly is he imagining that would be worse? Really, what is it?
I think Comey is imagining something that he knows now isn’t true, but that he really thought would be true when he made the decision on October 27. Comey thought the FBI was going to find something incriminating. He really did. It is the only way to understand his decision-making then, and his attempt to justify it now. What he was deathly afraid of was that Clinton would win and then afterwards it would be revealed that she had actually committed a crime. In that scenario, the wrath of the world that he lived in — almost exclusively Republican — would have come squarely down on his head. That was the scenario he most feared, and that he most wanted to avoid. That was why the “Conceal” door, as he describes it, looked so threatening. He didn’t see that inside that door was another, much more likely scenario — that the FBI would find nothing incriminating on the laptop, making his failure to disclose the new search both harmless and easy to explain. The Conceal door only becomes scary if you think the chance of finding incriminating evidence was higher than the chance of not finding any. Comey thought Clinton was guilty, and that the FBI would find, as he called it in his Senate testimony, the “golden e-mails” proving her guilt, that had eluded them so far.”
I have to admit that as an explanation for Comey’s awful decision Schoenberg’s has a lot of explanatory power.
From the start of his analysis on Comey’s awful Letter Schoenberg has rightly focused on the warrant as it’s not at all clear what the probable cause was supposed to be-he wrote this on November 14 under a week after Trump’s illegitimate “election.”
FN: The irony is that while the IG bought the idea that a factor in Comey’s decision was the concern that otherwise she’d be an illegitimate President is that by the act of his intervention, Comey both won it for Trump but also condemned his Administration to illegitimacy-as the IG report quoted above notes-Comey seemed to be utterly insensible to this possibility. But that’s the paradox-Comey won it for Trump but in a sense he also lost it-Trump could never after this convincingly claim to be a legitimate President-no doubt he claimed unconvincingly so many times during his catastrophic-to use Comey’s word-regime. Indeed, this is why this was such a sensitive point for Trump-why he never stopped talking about this allegedly “historic landslide victory”-because he knew many questioned it-with good reason.
As strange, and possibly illegal, as it was for Comey to make his announcement regarding the investigation so close to the election, from the outset, I wondered what the legal grounds were for searching through the new e-mails found on the laptop of her aide Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony Weiner. Two days after the letter, on Sunday October 30, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department had obtained a search warrant. I have yet to see any further reporting on the warrant. To get a search warrant issued, the FBI needed to go to a federal judge. It is interesting to me that Comey sent his letter before obtaining the warrant. The publicity certainly must have influenced the judge. A judge cannot simply grant any request for a search warrant. Under the Fourth Amendment, a search must be reasonable, meaning that there must be “probable cause” or a “reasonable suspicion” that evidence of a crime will be discovered. Ordinarily, the FBI submits an affidavit describing the evidence that gives rise to the reasonable suspicion. We have yet to see what evidence the FBI relied on in seeking the warrant.
The only thing Comey said in his letter about the grounds for reviewing the e-mails found on Weiner’s laptop was that they “appear to be pertinent” to the FBI’s prior investigation of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server as Secretary of State. But it is important to remember how unusual and politically motivated the investigation was, and that it had never elicited any evidence of a crime.
In December, 2016 Schoenblog filed a lawsuit to see the warrant.
While he had some success, the FBI continued to withhold crucial pieces-it was unwilling to release the unredacted warrant.
But honestly, you don’t need to go to skeptics like a Seth Abramson, a Randol Schoenblog-to say nothing of the author of this book-or even an insider critic like Lisa Page Look at what a high ranking agent with the Emailgate team like Trisha Anderson said. Unlike McCabe and Page she was allowed into Comey’s Emailgate debate on October 27, 2016.
Nominally speaking in any case she told the IG investigators that she agreed with Comey’s decision.
UPDATE: Was Anderson the “junior agent?”
UPDATE: Another Schoeonberg post-about Comey’s partisanship
FN: It’s not clear that you could get invited to the Emailgate debate unless you agreed with Comey!
“Anderson told us that she believed Comey needed to supplement his
testimony to Congress because it “was such a significant issue” that “it would have
been misleading by omission.” Anderson stated that even though Comey did not
explicitly tell Congress he would update them, it was “implied” in “his testimony
overall.”
Pg. 366
Again while as the IG report itself goes on to point out policy is to not intervene before the election and there’s no “significant issue” exception, in fairness to Ms. Anderson, this was a meeting where you kind of had to drink Comey’s coolaid assuming you wanted to get through the door.
And indeed, after the meeting she did express some reservations and concerns to Jim Baker.
FN: FWIW, in the IG report Baker told the FBI that he “may have been” the first to broach the idea of telling (the GOP) Congress.
Pg. 369
Pg. 370
Indeed, seen in this light, Ms. Anderson’s words are quite paradoxical. She claims she agreed with the decision to notify Congress before even getting a warrant, yet by her own account it was unlikely the emails would be material. And if it was unlikely-you don’t have due process.
Comey told the IG team he responded to Ms. Anderson’s concern this way:
Schoenberg also had a good response to this Comey canard:
FN: The man is a canard machine.
“By now, Comey has discussed ad nauseam the thinking that led him to decide to disclose the laptop search immediately by sending a letter to Congress. As I have said, he and the remainder of the Midyear team had an obvious blind spot to the likelihood that they would quickly know that there were no relevant emails on the laptop. Comey has testified that just one person, who has been described as a female “junior lawyer”, questioned whether he should worry about affecting the election. I believe that person was Lisa Page, but then supposedly she was excluded from the big meeting. So I am not sure. Maybe this was at a subsequent meeting.
As we were arriving at this decision, one of the lawyers on the team asked a searing question. She was a brilliant and quiet person, whom I sometimes had to invite into the conversation. “Should you consider what you are about to do may help elect Donald Trump president,” she asked?
I paused for several seconds. It was of course the question that was on everyone’s mind, whether they expressed it out loud or not.
I began my reply by thanking her for asking that question. “It is a great question, ” I said, “but not for a moment can I consider it. Because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent force in American life. If we start making decisions based on whose political fortunes will be affected, we are lost.”
Comey was spectacularly wrong on this point, and he has yet to understand or admit his error. The rule is that the FBI should affirmatively avoid interfering with elections, when possible, not that it should be agnostic. Comey chose to be agnostic. He refused to consider whether his actions would interfere with the election. The choice that Comey had was not Speak or Conceal, but Interfere or Not Interfere. He should have chosen not to interfere. It really is that simple.”
Exactly-that’s the whole point of the Hatch Act.
FN: Regarding Comey’s ‘junior agent’-as we saw above it seems it was actually not Lisa Page but Trisha Anderson-junior or not she made a lot more sense than Comey.
As we saw above, Schoenberg had some fun with Comey’s excitement over the prospect of Weiner’s laptop containing Hillary’s “golden emails” but the IG report itself goes on to show how unlikely this event was-unlikely as the opposite of probable-which is what is needed for a search warrant.
Just another of the many conundrums of Comeygate. A mystery wrapped inside of an enigma.
Yet another such conundrum is how exactly anyone ever believed it would take months and months to go through the emails on Weiner’s laptop?
Each of the participants in the FBI discussions to seek the search warrant
told us that no one expected the review of the Weiner laptop to be completed prior
to the election. Comey told us that this fact—that the Midyear team did not expect
to finish the review of the Weiner laptop prior to the election—“was a really
important fact for me” in making the decision whether to make the October 28
announcement.
“Comey stated that he asked the Midyear team directly during these
discussions if they could “finish the review before the election.” Comey said that
the team told him, “There’s absolutely no way we’ll get that done before the election. It will be long after the election.”
Pgs. 372-373
All the Emailgate agents sing this sad song but it simply beggars belief-was this really the first time in the FBI’s history they had to go through a large batch of emails? How could they have possibly believed it would take months?
“I’d also focus on what happened during that final week. Did he really authorize the search warrant on October 27 but they didn’t submit the application until Sunday October 30? Each and every day after that, they found nothing. On Monday they found nothing. On Tuesday they found nothing. Etc. What was reported to Comey? Comey said that what they really wanted was to see the Blackberry e-mails (not the ones from the server). Is the New York Times correct that none were ever found? How long did that take to determine? How could it take more than a few minutes? Why were they still reviewing e-mails on Saturday November 5? Did they print them out? What exactly were they looking for? I have hundreds of thousands of e-mails on my laptop also, and I know how to find things. It’s not by printing out the e-mails and reading them. You search words. It’s not rocket science. My guess is that they knew almost immediately that they weren’t going to find the Golden Ticket. And yet they persisted. Comey makes it sound heroic, but it wasn’t. It was the opposite. They were searching and searching for something that didn’t exist, that never existed, but that they had imagined existed. There never was a Golden Ticket.”
And lo and behold:
So we’re supposed to believe this was the first time Strozk-Comey and Friends had ever heard of de-duplicate technology? Was it the first time it had ever been used in the history of the FBI?
OTOH you don’t want to believe that all these Emailgate agents-Comey-Strozk-everyone else at the Comey Letter meeting-lied about this, OTIH, I can’t think of a better explanation either. Looking at the 30,000 foot view, we’ve seen how-like Nance says-coincidences take a lot of planning, and the GOP co-conspirators-both inside and out of the NYPD and NY FBI-intricately planned every level of this.
FN: For those still in stubborn denial about this step back for a moment and just appreciate the perfect timing. As Schoenberg quoted above notes, if the election had come even two days later Clinton probably would have won. Coincidences take a lot of planning and it simply beggars belief that any “coincidence” could be this convenient.
We see how they did everything to entrap Weiner-finally paying a 15 year old girl $30,000 dollars to sext him and ask him to send pics. Meanwhile the Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith Nexus secured Huma Abedin’s emails obtained from Judicial Watch’s successful FOIA lawsuit and had them placed on Weiner’s laptop-perhaps as Mensch theorized the Russian hackers Smith paid put them there-perhaps CWA and Nikulin among them.
Chapter Mensch for more.
FN: Certainly not hard to understand the FBI’s reticence to simply ask Huma Abedin to voluntarily give them her emails.
“Through it all, we have Huma Abedin at once being termed a fully cooperative witness by the FBI but also telling everyone who’ll listen that she did not have any emails on the computer that Weiner gave the FBI. And yet, by October 29th, nearly four weeks after the “new” emails were discovered, the FBI still had not contacted Abedin—not even once—about her emails being on Weiner’s work computer. This was an exceedingly odd investigatory decision for a law enforcement agency that (given what they knew at the time) could have seriously considered charging Abedin with a federal crime for withholding evidence from them. Indeed, it’s a strange enough decision that it begs the question of whether the FBI didn’t want to give Abedin a public or even private platform to deny knowledge of how her emails came to be on her estranged husband’s work computer. Whatever the reason for the appearance of “new” Abedin emails on Weiner’s computer—with all signs pointing to a readily detectable, passive “email account synching” process—why was the FBI not at all interested in getting answers from Abedin herself in the four weeks after such an critical discovery? Why did they not use those four weeks to interview Abedin at least once, the better to brief their boss when they finally deigned to tell him that his old, nationally important case potentially had reams of new evidence?”
End FN
Coincidences take a lot of planning and it’s clear Comeygate was planned on every level and every track every step of the way through the point they-Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith-Flynn-Prince-Bannon, Smith’s friends at NYPD et al. planted Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop.
Yet we’re supposed to believe what? Once it got there the GOP co-conspirators just trusted dumb luck to get it over the finish line? In this vein it couldn’t be clearer why it took them a month to get the search warrant-because as even Comey noted-if it had come out a month earlier it would have had much less impact and Comey probably wouldn’t have done his damnable letter.
FN: A month earlier and Hillary wins in a near landslide
So I don’t know how or who but my theory is that the one month delay was deliberate and the nonsense about it taking months to look through a few emails was pretext for the Comey Letter. This doesn’t mean I think Comey himself was in on this-my guess is he was sort of backed into it-his bad instincts did the rest.
FN: I even less believe that McCabe-Strozk-Page, etc were in on it. But the fact pattern clearly points to a conspiracy to hide the truth on what took so long on the emails that last crucial month-and I can believe they were in on it. At a minimum I presume they know a lot more than they have said publicly-or to the IG investigators, etc
My theory is that every piece of this was planned by the GOP co-conspirators-again quite possibly with the help of Russian hackers as Louise Mensch theorizes-Chapter B.
FN: Again note the point your author made above that the GOP Congress-certainly at least the leadership if not the whole membership already knew about the emails over a month before October 28-ie with all the talk of Comey fearing leaks the existence of the emails had already been leaked maybe before Comey was aware of them.
My theory leads me to butt against the heads of the tendency of the ‘savvy’ MSMers who presume that-unless the subject is Hillary Clinton-“conspiracies” are unpossible-everything is just happenstance and coincidence.
But what’s really concentrated my mind recently is watching Annalise Keating on How to Get Away With Murder. Annalise plans everything-there are very few coincidences in her world. What helps her-she ultimately gets away with everything even though she essentially kills her husband’s mistress, kills him-blames him for killing the mistress-then kills Sinclair the prosecutor who was giving her a hard time and has her corpse delivered to her like a tribute in the back of a trunk. She then frames one of her clients-it turns out the innocent client.
FN: Ok technically her husband did kill the young college age mistress though you do wonder even here wether A deliberately triggered this in some way-it’s kind of a stock and trade of hers.
What helps Annalise so much is that she keeps her own hands clean-she has her flunkies do her dirty work and so most people will find it hard to believe she was guilty for anything-for to believe so would be conspiracy theorizing.
And with Emailgate cum Comeygate too it’s clear that at every level it was planned out. Annalise does all her thinking herself but she has her minions do her dastardly deeds. Comeygate was a very different kind of operation which had many co-conspirators on different tracks and levels.
Now in this book we look at many of these tracks-the Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith nexus, the Sydney Leathers-Chuck Johnson-Alanis track which led to paying for a 15 year old girl entrapping Weiner into sending her sexts.
But there are obviously many more tracks we haven’t yet gotten to. We have Trump’s Nostradamus moment in 2015-‘Weiner will tell the world.’ Based on everything we’ve documented I’m not prepared even here to presume that was a lucky guess.
FN: It was clearly an idea of the GOP co-conspirators a long time-weaponizing Weiner’s pitiful “sex addiction”-I give it scare quotes as it’s such a postmodernist version of sex addiction-of course sex addiction itself is already postmodernist-he had no sex. There was no sex.
So my working assumption is that the Comey Letter wasn’t done until 11 days before the election as that was the optimal moment for the October Surprise.
FN: Again this doesn’t necessarily mean that Comey was consciously involved in the planning-much less McCabe, Strozk-Page, etc. My assumption is that he wasn’t-he was probably manipulated as he’d manipulated DOJ-but he was clearly very easy to work-after all this is a guy who claims he gave the Comey Presser just because they were talking about Tarmacgate all weekend on Fox.
Why did Comey tell us it would take months? To justify the rush to do the letter 11 days before a Presidential election where the other candidate-the candidate who he would help win-was under investigation by his own FBI for colluding with Russia.
So let’s remember how we got to this day-September 26, 2016 when these Huma emails allegedly fell in the NY FBI’s laps like manna from Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome Heaven.
1. Stone-Corsi-Smith obtained Huma’s emails from Judicial Watch’s lawsuit.
2. After failing to get standing in court for Huma’s emails, the Late Peter Smith had his GOP intel and law enforcement buddies get on it. According to Corsi, they would not have succeeded if not for Peter Smith-may the Devil take his soul…
As we saw in Chapter A-here’s what Roger Stone said in this regard:
“Anyone with access to Abedin’s username and password could read in real time and all the completely unredacted emails Abedin sent to her yahoo.com email account. Much of September 2016 was taken trying to find a legal way to force Yahoo.com to make a public list of all IP addresses that could identify various Internet users that had attempted to had obtained the sought after IP information.”
FN: Note however that this too has the inconvenience of not being true-Weiner wasn’t “caught sexting underage girls again”-in point of fact this was the first time and only with a massive entrapment campaign from the GOP co-conspirators who’d been trying to brand him with the pedophile tag for years.
Alas:
“Unfortunately, the lawyers involved in the investigation could not establish legal standing to launch a lawsuit attempting to obtain the sought-after IP information. Finally, Corsi speculated that if Abedin had taken the trouble to archive State Department emails in her Yahoo.com email account, Abedin may have also surmised that she needed to keep the project secret by using a computer or other device not issued to her or registered by her with the State Department. Speculation developed that Abedin might have kept such a laptop or other device at her home with Weiner in New York City.”
3. In January, 2017 Louise Mensch hypothesized that Russian hackers planted Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop. This seems very plausible when you remember that Peter Smith’s evil genius plan was to pay Russian hackers to get Hillary’s emails.
4. The trajectory was that the NYPD opened the Weiner investigation then invited the NY FBI on. They didn’t have to ask twice. The NY FBI was able to get in on it by framing it as about pedophilia.
“The investigators working with Corsi had reason to believe Weiner was once again under investigation by the New York Police Department and the FBI for sexting to underage girls. Sexting to underage girls using his cellphone was the “Weinergate” offense that forced Weiner to resign from the House of Representatives in 2011.”
“Investigators working with Corsi also had reason to believe that certain FBI agents, unhappy with Comey’s decision in July to suspend the criminal investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, had not given up trying to find a way to reopen the investigation. While the disgruntled FBI agents in New York would never have gotten permission from Washington to reopen an investigation into the Clinton email case, cooperating with the NYPD in an investigation of suspected illegal sexual activity involving minors was a different matter. Conceivably, no prior authorization from the FBI in DC was required for the FBI in NY to join the NYPD in executing a search warrant on former Congressman Weiner.”
Reason to believe-because their fellow anti Clinton people at the NYPD told them.
What’s undeniable then is this: how ever accurate you choose to believe John Robertson’s story is on how he just happened to be minding his own business looking at Weiner’s laptop for pedophilia and then suddenly all these Hillary emails turned up out of nowhere like manna from Clinton Derangement Syndrome Heaven-and at this point I’m not prepared to take the stories of anyone involved in the But Her Emails investigation in the FBI-as from Comey on down they’ve proven themselves again and again to be unreliable narrators-at face value.
FN: More below on how unreliable Comey is on anything regarding Emailgate and his role in it below.
I’m even less to take what Robertson takes at face value as it’s Devlin Barrett scoop-the favorite mainstream journalist of the rogue anti Clinton agents.
But look-even if you are inclined to presume Robertson’s telling the truth without attempting to verify it independently-again don’t know why you’d be so inclined but in any case it’s clear that someone at NY FBI knew in advance what was on Weiner’s laptop-it was no surprise to them. And it’s possible Robertson wasn’t in the loop though again I’m choosing to give no FBI agents involved in Emailgate any benefit of the doubt.
But it was no surprise-Peter Smith’s buddies filled them in-that was the whole point of NY FBI joining NYPD.
The idea that Huma’s emails to and from Hillary were on Weiner’s laptop was hatched by (the late)Peter Smith and his NYPD friends.
Now let’s switch from Stone’s version to Corsi’s:
“When Yahoo refused to give the information to Peter Smith, he and I speculated that if Huma was off-loading Hillary’s State Department to her Yahoo account, it was likely she was using a personal computer, not a State Department computer, to archive the emails. This led Peter and me to speculate that Huma used a laptop belonging to her husband, the notorious sexting criminal, the former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Peter convinced his contacts at the New York Police Department to investigate. ”
“While FBI Director Comey had already closed down the federal criminal investigation of Hillary’s private email server, the NYPD convinced the FBI in New York to join the raid, given the investigation was to catch a sex criminal, not to target Hillary Clinton or Huma Abedin. The rest is history.”
Then you have 3-Mensch’s conjecture that Russian hackers planted Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop-which is very plausible when you remember Smith’s Evil Genius Plan in 2016 was paying Russian hackers to steal HRC’s emails. There’s your probable cause-something that Comey never had at any point of Emailgate-there was no PC to open it and no PC to ‘maybe maybe not reopen’ it 11 days before the election.
So wether John Robertson was a co-conspirator-of whatever level-or wether he was a straight man in the conspiracy out of the loop but playing his part, the powers that be at NY FBI knew he’d ‘find’ Huma’s emails as: they planted it there. Again it was Peter Smith’s idea.
Let’s look at the IG’s version of agent Robertson’s Immaculate Discovery of That Woman’s Emails:
So I don’t understand, to be sure I’m no tech expert-the software was slow so he looked in the email folder-to find what? I mean how would the fact that an email was between Huma and Hillary impact the speed of the software program? And the first email ‘just happened’ to be between HRC and Abedin. What are the odds of that? Well, 1 out of 300,000. There was one HRC-Huma email out of 300,000 and that just happened to be the first one Roberson saw? Again Robertson may or may not have been in on it but clearly the folks he gave it to him knew what he was going to find.
“Fourth, while the investigation was broadly conducted with integrity and reached the right answer, there were significant errors in the conduct of the probe. This is unsurprising with such a complex undertaking done under intense pressure; mistakes happen when human systems function under stressful conditions. That said, some of the errors were significant and fateful.”
For example, on Oct. 30, 2016, the team conducting the email investigation—code-named the Midyear inquiry—obtained a search warrant for the laptop of Anthony Weiner. The IG report finds that every fact that was cited in the justification for the warrant was known by FBI executives, and the FBI Midyear team, no later than Sept. 29. Some portion of the criticism Comey received for his decision to notify Congress on Oct. 28 about the reopened investigation stems from the fact that this notification came only 12 days before the presidential election. And when Comey sent his letter to Congress, it was unclear whether the investigation could be resolved before voters went to the polls. The IG report makes clear that Comey’s revelation could have taken place a month earlier, when the stakes would have been significantly lower.
The report does not explain precisely why this happened.”
Why it happened however couldn’t be clearer-indeed their report contains the answer they just don’t want to see it-the stakes would have been far lower. The whole point was to leak it at the last minute when the October Surprise could do maximum damage and that sure wasn’t on September 29.
FN: In Chapter Devin Nunes, we see that Nunes himself knew about the emails by September 29. So not to put too fine a point on it-on September 26 the se crimes with minors investigation into Weiner begun. On the 27th Robertson found the one email out of 300,000 between Huma and HRC on the top of the page. Very first email he sees. Then by the 29th Nunes the GOP HSPCI Chairman is already aware of the email.
UPDATE: So this wasn’t an October Surprise for Devin Nunes-and you can safely assume the rest of the GOP Congress. Jason Chafe posted Comey’s memo indignantly on Twitter on October 28 but it’s a pretty good best he also had known about it for the better part of a month
End UPDATE
I both agree and disagree with Ben Wittes-the man who peevishly scolded us after Barr’s fake exoneration letter that ‘maybe we can give AG Barr the benefit of the doubt.
FN: Only later-too late-did Wittes admit how off base his trust in Barr was.
Certainly I could not disagree with his assertion more that the investigation was broadly conducted with integrity-at every point Comey flouted protocol and policy, grandstanded, dragged it out thereby damaging Clinton politically even if he did-way too late come to the right conclusion albeit in an investigation that should never have been opened in the first place.
The question that begs-one of a great plethora of the many begging questions -is why it took him so long to get to the right answer when a reasonable investigator would have gotten there much sooner-assuming this reasonable investigator wasn’t full of his own moral vanity and wasn’t biased against the subject.
FN: Arguably the right time was July-August 2015-see Chapter What was the Probable Cause?
And of course when he got there finally he had no right to do the Presser and it was yet another significant and fateful mistake. The entire investigation was one long, running fateful mistake.
“But the timeline is fairly clear. On Sept. 26, 2016, the New York Field Office obtained a search warrant for Weiner’s iPhone, iPad and laptop computer. In reviewing the laptop later that day, the case agents realized there were more than 300,000 emails on the computer, including one between Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and 39 other senior FBI executives were briefed on the existence of Weiner’s laptop and the potentially relevant emails on Sept. 28, and McCabe says he told Comey about the laptop “right around the time” he found out about it—but the IG found no evidence that anyone at the FBI took action on the laptop until Oct. 24. The issue came up again only because a New York field agent raised serious concerns with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York about the lack of action.”
The field agent was John Roberston, of course. But once again not to belabor it but it’s amazing so let’s make sure we have this straight: there were 300,000 emails on the computer and one Robertson knew of for sure between HRC and Abedin and the first email out of 300,000 is the one he just happens to glance at? Despite the odds of this particular email being the one that jumped out at him being just 1 in 300,000. Maybe he should play the lottery. If he truly did come across this by luck then whoever sent it to him put this email at the top of the page.
Of this there’s no doubt. The only question is wether or not he was in the loop or unsuspecting.
FN: We need to know the trajectory from when Robertson allegedly saw this single email between Clinton and Huma-Robertson missed his calling as the guy leading searches for needles in haystacks-on September 27 and when Devin Nunes got this information within the next day and a half.
Look regarding why Comey did the Comey Letter I think we have the basic pieces in place. I’d say there were three important factors:
1. The leaks of the rogue anti Clinton agents
2. Comey’s moral vanity
But you have to remember 3-which Schoenberg has done a very good job documenting.
3. Comey is himself a life long GOP hack who has hunted the Clintons for years. He’s hunted HRC for years. n Ken Starr’s recent book looking back at his appalling Whitewater boondoggle he’s almost apologetic and devotes an entire chapter to explaining his failure to indict then First Lady Hillary Clinton. It’s arguable-and I do argue-that Comey indicted Martha Stewart as a sort of Hillary Clinton surrogate-if the many Clinton haters at the FBI couldn’t have Clinton, Stewart was a kind of consolation prize.
FN: This theory at least has the convenience of making sense-otherwise how do you explain it? Stewart hadn’t committed a crime, yet Comey and Friends jailed her-Lock Her Up! You may not like my theory but it’s the only explanation that makes any sense.
On this point I owe a debt to Schoenberg as it was in reading his piece this point became clear to me-everyone else almost universally-even from his sharpest critics like CAP-rashly assumes Comey didn’t act out of partisan bias-despite the clear pattern of GOP partisanship both for Comey and his agency during the 25 years the Clintons were part of our national politics.
Note how different the attitude is here than with Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates-many starting with Comey and McCabe-the Director and Deputy Director of the FBI-argued they should have recused simply because they were Democrats.
Now I don’t think Comey is on the same level as the rogue anti Clinton agents-they’re willing to explicitly abuse their power in the service of their own partisan GOP preferences.
OTOH Comey would never consciously do that-his moral vanity won’t allow others to think he acts out of crude partisanship-or even allow himself to feel that he does. But he shares much of the same anti Clinton bias. Almost everyone at the FBI does going back to 1992-Chapter A. And Comey was on the Whitewater investigation with Ken Starr.
FN: And again-he indicted the Hillary like Marth Stewart, another uppity liberal woman who didn’t know her place.
But if there’s any one thing the Emailgate fiasco should convince you of it’s that Comey is not a reliable narrator on anything regarding Emailgate. Nothing he says ever makes any sense-and that’s because he’s not at all candid about anything Emailgate-quite the opposite.
UPDATE: Place this below in proper place but James Baker seems to have been Comey’s hatchet man in both introducting the idea of the Comey Letter as well as barring McCabe from the meeting-who opposed the idea of a Comey Letter
To be sure when it was between him and Trump on Trump firing him Comey was more credible-there’s no one less credible than Trump. That’s practically a Natural Law. But it is also for all intents and purposes a Natural Law that nothing Comey says to justify the Comey Letter-or the Comey Presser-or anything he did in Emailgate can be trusted. The truth is too embarrassing and shameful for him-he’ll do anything to dissemble in his self righteous, self serving, hamhanded clumsy way.
FN: I think Seth Abramson-with his history as a defense attorney-has discussed the sense in which in assessing the honesty or lack thereof of a witness you have to keep their own self serving interest in mind. When someone is on the hotseat they’re much more likely to lie-especially if they are guilty. When Comey faced off against Trump it was logical to believe him as it was Trump who had a self serving interest in lying but with Emailgate it’s Comey with the self interest in making sure as little of the full truth as possible seeps out.
To take just one example-we’ve looked at many-Conceal vs. Reveal, 500 Year Flood, Come Back With Me to That Day, Very Bad vs. Catastrophic-let’ compare what Comey vs. Loretta Lynch said about their October 31, 2016 meeting-after Comey had made a total dog’s breakfast of things with his letter.
So this was the itinerary of the meeting: the Comey Letter was a blunder-true though at that stage of the game kind of an understatement-and that they need to wrap up the process as fast as possible. Basically Lynch’s point was Comey f-ed up and he needed to fix it ASAP.
FN: Though by then that was probably impossible. Damage had been done. Any attempt to fix it was probably closing the barn door after the cows were in the mountains.
Yet this is how Comey characterized it:
So Lynch-and Deputy Sally Yates-planned that meeting with the express purpose of making two points: the Comey Letter was a major blunder and he needed to fix his mess ASAP-yet in Comey’s narrative her two points were to hug him and tell him he made the right decision. In her version-which we will look at below-Lynch agrees she probably hugged him. But to suggest that she agreed with his decision is pretty misleading. It’s also plain false.
FN: BTW it’s not clear to me that Comey’s alternative scenario-it leaks via rogue agents rather than from himself, the FBI Director on November 6 rather than October 28-would have been a worse scenario. It could have been more easily dismissed without the authority of Comey behind it and it would have been just two days before the election-when a lot of voting was already in. It’s quite possible if not probable it wouldn’t have gotten so deep into the electorate’s bloodstream on November 6.
FN: Then there’s the revelation of Chapter Devin Nunes that the GOP Congress was aware of the emails all along. In reality the GOP Congress already had the information on the emails but needed Comey to reveal it in late October-again it’s very tough to believe this wasn’t a “vast Right wing conspiracy” as HRC would say when you appreciate how perfect the timing was-November would have been too late.
You have to give it to Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith and Friends-Flynn, Giuliani, Prince, Bannon, etc-they dropped their October Surprise-notice it’s called October not November Surprise-at the optimal moment just when it would hit the news coverage just the right way. By November 6-not coming from Comey himself it would have had less effect.
In any case this is besides the point, you don’t negotiate with terrorists and pay the ransom. But once again, just like with the presser-see Chapter Comey’s Fake Russian Doc-Comey’s ‘solution’ was to pay the ransom.
End FN
So he left out the meet of the meeting. As Seinfeld would put it, Comey yada yada-ed the meeting on his Comey Letter blunder-she hugged me, and told me I made the right choice and-yada yada yada.
I’ll think about that. One observation Andy McCabe-who Lynch mentions below in the conversation with Comey-made in his book is that Lynch’s style as AG was to avoid confrontations at all cost. Unlike Eric Holder before her. Remember when Comey kept the memos of his meetings with Trump. When Trump told him ‘Maybe you can let this Mike Flynn thing go’ Comey persuasively testified that he read this not as a suggestion or opinion of Trump’s but an order.
Clearly with Lynch, Comey rarely seemed to take anything she said as an order even though she was his direct superior. Here too, Comey takes her idea as a suggestion not an order-and in all fairness she hardly made it sound like an order.
FN: Indeed, the IG criticizes her and Yates for failing to order Comey not to do either the Comey Presser or Letter.
I hear you. Ie-I hear you. I’m not going to do what you ask but I hear you. And again-I agree with the IG’s verdict that Lynch should have pushed back a lot more. No doubt clearly he jammed her on the Comey Letter just as he did on the Comey Presser. But between Comey who was a cowboy and Lynch-who was adverse to conflict-it was a perfect recipe for disaster. Note that she begun by telling him what she thinks he should do but he immediately pivots to ‘I’ll think about it’-which makes it not her but his decision.
And-of course-we ended up yet again with the worst of all worlds as Comey would ‘think about it’ and ‘think not’-he put out no statement though did put out the terse statement that they found nothing new in the emails the Sunday before the election-an action that did nothing to stem the bleeding for HRC-if anything it was yet more salt in the wounds-it was effectively throwing a life preserver so hard at someone desperately trying to swim back onto the boat that you knock them back under the water. They’d have been better saying nothing more at that point-the damage had more than been done. Possibly her initial idea of an immediate clarifying statement on October 31 might have had some benefit-apparently Comey chose to wait until November 6 when it did more harm than good.
FN: Though I’m far from confident even of that. It’s arguable that after his Letter the damage was done and any attempt to clarify was just more fuel on the fire.
By the following week it was more harm than good-it just reminded voters of the whole mess yet again.
In any case she does corroborate Comey’s version that they discussed leaks though the stress is different. He made it sound like she approved of the letter as it would leak anyway; her point is that the Comey Letter was wrong but perhaps the leaks make it understandable. Basically she was trying to give Comey’s medicine a spoon full of sugar-but Comey seems to have extracted the sugar and poured the medicine down the drain.
So they do both agree that they discussed the leaks of the rogue anti Clinton agents at NY FBI-but while he claims she believed that validated his decision she clearly doesn’t see it that way-she’s clear it was the wrong choice though the leaks were the extenuating circumstance. Yet even here Comey is less than candid. He can’t even bring himself to admit that the leaks were a major factor in his-catastrophic decision to paraphrase himself.
On Emailgate he’s never candid. If we can be certain of anything here it’s that he’s never reliable on his role here-it’s too incriminating and makes him look too terrible.
FN: Which is why once Showtime chose his book for the basis of their movie you knew there would be little of interest in it. If there’s any Comey Rule-that’s it: don’t trust anything he says about the Emailgate investigation and his central role in it. Showtime, high on Comey’s supply, made him this towering moral figure of uncompromising integrity-ie, this movie does little but highlight Comey’s moral vanity. The reality is he’s no hero he’s the Bill E. Buckner of American politics.
UPDATE: See Chapter Bill E. Buckner
Even what Comey said about the rogue anti Clinton agents is absurd.
Stunning to Comey? Really? He only learned then that Hillary Clinton was the anti Christ to the-GOP dominated-FBI? As we saw in Chapter B the FBI-aka Trumpland aka GOPland-had Clinton Derangement Syndrome going back to the 1992 election-they were indignant when Clinton beat Bush Sr-who they loved-and like most Republicans, they felt Clinton had somehow played unfair.
FN: Rich considering their candidate won the Presidency via Willie Horton but consistency has never been a GOP trait wether in or without the FBI.
They believed somehow Clinton lacked legitimacy which is ironic as they would elect Trump in 2016 thereby cursing his Presidency with the valid-rather than the invalid claim that Clinton lacked legitimacy-scourge of illegitimacy.
Comey who spent 20 years investigating the Clintons and came up with Ken Starr to investigate Whitewater-like Emailgate a totally fake scandal-didn’t know prior to October, 2016 that there was animus against Hillary Clinton at the FBI?
Consider Ken Starr’s 2017 book looking back on the Whitewater 1990s. Starr is about as reliable a narrator on Whitewater as Comey is on Emailgate. But one thing that comes through is the hatred the entire Whitewater team had for Hillary Clinton.
FN:
Indeed, as noted above, Starr had to devote an entire chapter justifying them not going on to indict her. Lock Her Up didn’t start in 2016 it was a GOP fantasy since the early days of her husband’s Presidency. Starr chronicles how much he and the other Clinton haters on the team-notably Hickman Ewing but he was far from the only one-wanted to Lock Her up. The only problem? They had no basis for it.
“Bill was questioned for three hours about Whitewater and the 825 loan by Brad Lerman. He framed a series of “Did you know?” questions. Clinton bobbed and weaved, but was always pleasant as he avoided answering. When Hillary arrived, it was a different story. No small talk. For three hours, she answered questions posed by John Bates, a career Assistant U.S. Attorney from Washington.”
“Her responses were so glib, so superficial, they were almost “in your face,” alternating on the theme of profound memory loss. In the space of three hours, she claimed, by our count, over a hundred times that she “did not recall” or “did not remember.” This suggested outright mendacity. To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous.”
Pgs. 119-120
Well I take it back-she engaged in no small talk and she said she didn’t remember a lot-clearly proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Reagan too used to say ‘I don’t recall a lot’-as did Ken Starr himself when he was later questioned by Congress. Jerome Corsi-as related in his own book-seemed unable to remember his own name without it being sewn on his suit jacket sleeve during his Mueller interviews…
So that was it-she wasn’t friendly like her husband-who’s as friendly as Bill?-and she said she didn’t recall a lot. For that they believed she should be indicted.
“The following Monday, July 24, back in Little Rock, I invited Hickman and several other people involved in the investigation to have dinner at Kirby’s Grill & Bakery, across the street from the OIC. We had a two-hour briefing on the depositions over steak and baked potatoes. Hillary’s extraordinary lapses of memory—especially for a lawyer and self-described policy wonk—were not credible. Back at our office, we all agreed that we were unimpressed with Hillary’s performance. One staff member described her as “affirmatively dislikable.”
I asked Hickman what he thought about the Clintons’ testimony.
“The president I’d give a C,” Hickman said. “The First Lady, an F minus.”
“I had to agree. I was upset over Mrs. Clinton’s performance, and was even considering bringing the matter before the Washington grand jury for possible indictment on perjury.
She got an F minus-why? Because she wasn’t likable, she was ‘unlikable.’ This underscores that there was nothing new about the calumny against Hillary in 2016-she’d been accused of being ‘unlikable’ going back to Ken Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, Comey-who was on the Whitewater team-and Friends.”
Republicans had been insisting she was unlikable for years. In 2016 Right wing yellow journalist Edward Klein literally wrote book called Hillary is Unlikable.
So ‘Hillary is unlikable’ wasn’t new. And as becomes clear in Starr’s book, neither was Lock Her Up-it begun with Starr-Ewing-Kavanaugh. It became such a meme in 2016 that even after a Trump supporter sent HRC-and Obama and the rest of the top national Democrats in the country pipe bombs-Trump still led a Lock Her Up chant for his supporters that same night.
Lock Her Up was always an indictment and conviction looking for a crime. At the end of the day what was her crime? She was ‘unlikable’-what made her unlikable was she was-supposedly-‘arrogant.’
Arrogant, uppity women-particularly if they’re liberal Democrats need to be locked up who want to be POTUS are unlikable.
Yet in the end Starr had to admit that being ‘arrogant and unlikable while female’ was not an indictable offense.
“We found Hillary exhibited extreme high-handedness in the Travel Office purge, but arrogance was not an indictable offense.”
Pg. 238
Nor were they able to show any wrongdoing in Travelgate.
This was disappointing indeed for GOPland. However, as noted above, Comey was able to offer it some compensation by convicting the Hillary Clinton-like Martha Stewart and indeed Lock Her Up despite her having committed no crime.
So Comey is yet again failing to be candid-Hillary has been hated by the FBI and GOP leaning prosecutors for years.
FN: Just how deep Hillary hatred was in FBI DNA was underscored even in Peter Strozk’s book. Strozk related how agents were sidling up to him all the time declaring ‘I hope you nail the bitch’-yet even Strozk in no way seems to think THIS was ‘bias and animus’-what he and Lisa Page were sanctioned for.
So Comey and his GOP Friends had been dreaming of locking up THAT WOMAN-with her ‘arrogance and unlikability’ for over 20 years by 2016. This is the kernel that makes you realize Schoenberg is right as to Comey’s mindset on October 27, 2016.
It wasn’t that he thought HRC would win anyway so-go ahead and violate DOJ policy in an egregious way-it was that he like most Republicans had believed for 23 years that she was a criminal who hadn’t yet been caught-as many in the MSM also believed.
“…Comey, like most Republicans, believed that there was a sufficient cloud of suspicion over Hillary Clinton to justify pretty much any investigation. Think of how the FBI might treat a notorious gangster like Al Capone. “Get me something on him! Anything!” the FBI director might tell his subordinates. That certainly seems to be how many in the FBI thought of Clinton, even after Comey had reported in July that there would be no prosecution. Some agents were already in open revolt over the e-mail probe three weeks prior to Comey’s surprise announcement. So maybe they never even thought much about the probable cause requirement, and perhaps the judge signed the search warrant, mindful of the intense public attention to the issue, without really considering the legal standard of whether the suspicions raised were reasonable.”
And this is the FBI and GOP prosecutor culture that Comey grew up in, lived in, breathed in. It’s so basic so in the DNA as to not even be noticed. Everyone at the FBI-aka the agency that has never had a Democratic Director in its 112 year history-hated Hillary. Even Lisa Page didn’t like her much-though after Trump came on the scene HRC was the lesser of two evils.
And while in some ways Schoenberg may be right that Lisa Page was a would be hero-if she and Andy McCabe had gotten into that Comey Letter meeting it’s POSSIBLE things could have gone differently-which is no doubt why Comey made sure they weren’t-OTOH it’s easy to forget that Page and her boss McCabe had also kicked Hillary in the teeth yet again-while she was already floored by Comey’s letter on October 31, 2016 by leaking about the Clinton Foundation investigation.
FN: It’s rich that Trump and his GOP co-conspirators were ‘outraged’ over this leak as it hurt not helped Clinton.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/nine-takeaways-inspector-generals-report-clinton-email-investigation
Look at the end of the day if there’s one lesson Annalise Keating teaches us is that it’s very hard to prove a conspiracy. If A pays B to kill C who is most likely to get charged?
FN: B naturally.
This is also why to this day the conventional savvy narrative is that anyone who doesn’t believe Oswald acted alone is a fabulist-even though the official position of the US government is that Oswald didn’t act alone.
Comeygate was a very vast conspiracy-a la HRC-with many co-conspirators and many different tracks. So it’s not surprising that until now most have chosen to believe the facile cover story, the Emailgate version of the Warren Report: Yes, Comey shouldn’t have done the letter but HRC shouldn’t have set up that server and it was her bad luck that her close friend and aide’s husband was a sex perv who sexts with children.
That’s Annalise’s point to her students-it’s not the truth that wins but the best story. It’s not that Occam’s Razor is true-the truth is often not at all simple and digestable but most folks have neither the attention span or the inclination for it-they want whatever story doesn’t threaten their preconceptions or which one threatens the fewest.
OTOH Annalise-who got away with so much
FN: This is a woman who warned the District Attorney investigating her for the murder of her husband-which A did in fact have major complicity in-that you’re messing with the wrong bitch! And lo and behold, the next time Annalise saw Sinclair the woman was dead at the back of Bonnie’s car-Bonnie had thoughtfully brought it to A’s house-like a tribute. Annalise proved she can get away with pretty much anything.
End FN
-could have gotten Weiner off. It WAS a very simple story: entrapment. A father pimped out his own child to be the next Monica Lewinsky-for $35,000 dollars. Trouble is here is that it challenges many preconceptions about Weiner, the Clintons, the FBI, etc.
Beyond the normal inertia and preference for a simple story that flatters a prospective jury’s preconceptions you have the fact that many ‘serious people’ in both the FBI-Comey and Friends and MSM-Dean Baquet, Barrett, etc- don’t want the truth to come out.
FN: Although often the preconceptions are less of a jury than the legal powers that be themselves- Weiner’s own lawyer believed the conventional wisdom about his client-see chapter Mensch; the world that Mark Pomenaru-and his CF-describe is a world where often the prosecutor’s own heart isn’t in it when it comes to prosecuting the privileged and the powerful-whatever the jury’s preconceptions are things hit a snag with the preconceptions of the lawyers themselves-and their bosses at these top legal institutions.
Up at the top we poised Drum’s commentary on Comey:
“We’ll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he’s terminally stupid and didn’t realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that’s why Donald Trump is president.”
Again I think we know so little because the powers that be-in both the FBI and the MSM-don’t want us to know more-as it’s so embarrassing for them.
FN: This certainly seems true of Devlin Barrett.
As for Comey through our analysis in this chapter the picture that emerges is that in many ways he may well be terminally stupid. Certainly his various canards “reveal vs conceal”, a “choice between very bad and cataclysmic”, the “end of the FBI as an institution” and “a 500 year flood” are mind numbingly stupid. But regarding on many questions it’s often hard to decide wether he’s terminally stupid or terminally dishonest-as he has been on all matters regarding Emailgate and his disastrous supervision of it.
In a number of ways Comey is quiet stupid-at least when the subject is Emailgate. But he’s also a very unreliable narrator on Emailgate as we saw in comparing his version vs Loretta Lynch’s version of their post Comey Letter discussion. Comey did a Seinfeld-yada yadaed almost all of it-leaving out everything but that Lynch expressed concern for how he was holding up and hugged him.
She agrees on this but that was hardly the meat of the meeting. The overall impression he leaves is pretty misleading-she most certainly did not agree with his decision-in the notes that her and Sally Yates drew up the day before the point of the whole meeting was to let him know that he made the wrong decision and that he needed to clean it up ASAP.
But you’d never get this from Comey’s account, underscoring the fact that he’s always unreliable on this subject-because it makes him look so bad. We need to therefore take anything he’s said regarding this fiasco with a huge grain of salt.
There are so many unanswered questions regarding this fiasco known as Comeygate. As we’ve seen there are a great many awkward questions at every point-from how and why it was opened in the first place-despite dubious probable cause-as it was always obvious there was unlikely to be proven ill intent from Hillary.
Yet this was dragged out for almost a year-from late July 2015 to Comey’s wrongful presser of July 5, 2016. Again it’s not clear how there was ever probable cause for Emailgate in the first place and there are statements on the Emailgate team in late 2015 making it clear they thought it unlikely they’d ever find PC-Chapter B.
Even Comey by early 2016-as the IG report documents-was privately admitting they wouldn’t be able to show intent-and so had no criminal case. Yet he continued to drag it on month after month, leaving HRC twisting in the wind with the MSM absolutely obsessed. This is a violation of the legal principle of a timely exoneration-if you know you don’t have a case. You don’t get to just let a subject twist in the wind on the oft chance you MIGHT one day find THE GOLDEN EMAILS.
FN: Indeed yet another Emailgate irony was despite Comey’s alleged ‘queasiness’ when Lynch suggested they call it ‘a matter’-she was closer to the truth-Chapter C-as HRC was NEVER the subject, it was a ‘criminal investigation’ with no subject.
And every time Comey has attempted to explain all this he raises far more questions than he answers. We have all his awkward neologisms-‘conceal or reveal’, ‘500 year flood’, ‘merely very bad vs catastrophic.’
None of this makes any sense-which is why one might go with Drum’s suggestion that Comey is interminably stupid-at least when he tries to explain Emailgate. And this may well be true but what’s become clear is there’s more to it-he’s also been interminably dishonest.
Certainly there’s no reason to trust-and much reason to distrust-his explanations for why it took a month to get to the emails, much less why he decided to do the letter and then why he thought looking through them would take months.
In the IG report, apparently all whom the IG questioned on the Emailgate team backed up Comey’s claim they thought it would take months. So how do we explain this? I explain it this way: Comey’s lying and pushing others questioned to lie.
Occam’s Razor, shortest distance between two points. etc.
Yes that’s a pretty stark conclusion but it’s the only theory that makes any sense given the fact pattern-unless this was the first time in its history the FBI had looked through a few thousand emails. Then add to this Comey’s penchant for dishonesty whenever the subject is Emailgate-look at his shifting prevarications on the hacked Russian document he used as a pretext for doing the Presser-to name just one of many examples.
UPDATE: Abramson’s tweets on the delay
FN: Chapter C for more
End FN
I don’t think he’s reliable on why he thought it would take months to go through the emails because I don’t believe anything he’s said about Emailgate. And the same applies to anyone else who backs up his story on any point. And Showtime based it’s entire special on his book!
So then why did he claim it would take months? Because by then he was dug in on the letter-just like he’d previously been dug in on the presser-and saying it would take months was his justification for not “revealing”-as his revelation actually caused more confusion than it prevented as many thought he had reopened the investigation when he’s actually said he MIGHT-but interfering in the election.
FN: Or for that matter, he was dug in in opening the fake “criminal investigation” of Hillary in the first place despite lack of probable cause-Chapter No Probable Cause
Again trust no one involved in Emailgate-certainly no one at NY FBI. Why did it take a month to attempt to get a search warrant? Because as everyone agrees-even Comey-had the emails been revealed on September 28 rather than October 28, they’d have had little to no effect. A likely explanation is the rogue anti Clinton agents timed it for an October Surprise holding off for the perfect moment to jam Comey.
FN: Once again it should be pointed out-as it can’t be pointed out enough-that Devin Nunes and likely the entire GOP Congressional GOP leadership if not the entire GOP Congressional membership actually already knew about the emails on September 28-Chapter Devin Nunes.
FN: James Baker-who responded to the ‘President’ he and Comey elected firing him by declaring he loves him; never thought I’d have an opportunity to quote the Church Lady but Now isn’t that special!– claims to be who initially proposed the Comey Letter at the October 27 meeting, just as it was he who forced McCabe out of the meeting. But this doesn’t mean that it was Baker’s idea. The Comey Letter was vintage Comey-no doubt he thought his staff might digest this terrible idea a little easier if they believed it wasn’t his idea.
Kevin Drum’s comment one more time:
“We’ll never know for sure if James Comey did this because he’s terminally stupid and didn’t realize what impact it would have, or if he did it knowing full well what impact it would have. But he did it. And that’s why Donald Trump is president.”
Here I think Schoenberg is right-contrary to what Comey let the IG investigators believe, he didn’t send the letter because he figured Clinton would win anyway but because coming up with Louis Freeh and Ken Starr he-like most Republicans-thought HRC was a criminal who hadn’t yet been caught and that perhaps the emails-that Peter Smith’s friends-perhaps the Russian hackers he paid-planted on the emails contained the GOLDEN EMAILS that would finally Lock Her Up.
Again, Comey was part of the Lock Her Up community over at the FBI-in 2004 he locked up the Hillary Clintonlike Martha Stewart on baseless charges. This explains why he was willing to open up an investigation into Clinton despite the lack of probable cause-it was clear there wouldn’t be intent-he’d in fact locked up Stewart for nothing. So if Comey was willing to send Stewart to prison despite no evidence that she intended to lie-or even that she had lied-why not open an investigation into THAT WOMAN-who him and his GOP leaning friends at the FBI had wanted to LOCK UP since 1993-despite the fact that there was no proof of intent-without which there’s no case?
In any case we still need answers-what the FBI did in 2016 was in some ways even more outrageous than Russia-and for that matter, it seems Russian hackers may have collaborated with the FBI.
FN: Or at least with rogue agents at the FBI.
It’s a far bigger betrayal-after all, what would you expect from Putin? But for our top domestic intel agency to use its investigative powers to rig an election is a true crime against democracy.
But again-the powers that be really want to memory hole this-and they’ve had great success hithero. Michael Horowitz spent the Trump years delaying the investigation into the rogue FBI agents so he could do investigations Trump and the GOP co-conspirators wanted-like going after Andy McCabe, the one guy who might have been able to prevent the Comey Letter-which is why Comey forced his recusal.
Conclusion
So we’re left with questions upon questions upon still more questions.
So much we need to know. The full story of how Huma’s emails got on Weiner’s laptop-Stone and Corsi left us an outline in their respective books-Chapter Unreported Background.
Then as we see in Chapter Devin Nunes, after Robertson allegedly found one email out of 300,000 by accident, within 36 hours, Nunes had this information. And logically many other high ranking GOP co-conspirators. It’s likely that Michael Moore-who runs TruePundit-knew about it long before this-with his close relationship with Corsi.
Then there’s the question of the missing month between when Robertson ‘found’ them on September 27 and Comey’s October 28 letter. There’s the dubious claim that everyone in the Emailgate investigation believed searching the emails would take many months. Again, as noted above, this would make sense only if the FBI never had to deal with thousands of emails before where a larger number are likely duplicates.
To the extent that everyone on the Emailgate team backs up Comey’s dubious story that they thought it would take three months, no one on the Emailgate is credible at least on anything Emailgate related. This includes not just Comey but McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strozk, Jim Baker, Trisha Anderson, etc.
Clearly each member of the Emailgate needs to be drilled on this individually-both why they supposedly never heard of de deuplicating technology before and why it took so long. The question of the missing month must also focus on NYFBI starting with Robertson, his immediate supervisor, and all the way up the chain to figure out why this information was held and only released to Washington at the optimal moment to use the emails to damage Hillary’s campaign.
A number of these Emailgate folks are good people and public servants but got caught up in Comey’s canard. It’s clear that Trisha Anderson didn’t really agree with the Comey Letter-but he was her boss AND the Director of the FBI to boot so what could she do? If she pushed too hard perhaps she’d be thrown out of the meeting like McCabe and Page.
But even those like McCabe and Page who disagreed sharply with Comey on the Letter nevertheless backed up his claim that they thought it would take many months-a claim that doesn’t pass the laugh test.
What’s clear is we’re way past the time of giving anyone involved with the Emailgate fiasco the benefit of the doubt.
In summation once again as we saw above one major reason why Comey has been so successful until now in hiding the truth is that almost everyone-even those quite critical of his actions-have given him the benefit of the doubt.
Painter told NPR’s All Things Considered Monday that Comey’s first mistake was giving in to pressure from lawmakers who wanted to be kept posted on any further investigations related to Clinton.
“They do not have an obligation to do that,” Painter said. “He never should have promised Congress that he would give them updates with respect to Secretary Clinton, when he doesn’t do that with respect to anybody else, when it’s clear that the only reason they want the information is politics.”
And in the Times, Painter raises another concern about Trump and the Russian government, echoing Reid’s claim of a double standard between the FBI’s actions toward Clinton and the GOP candidate’s public encouragement that Russia hack Clinton’s emails.
“But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress that the candidate was under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.
“The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.”
Whether there was or wasn’t good reason for Comey’s announcement is certainly up for debate. Stephen Vladeck, constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, said on C-SPAN Monday that Comey’s letter left him “flabbergasted” and “raises serious questions about the FBI director’s judgment.”
But Vladeck says intent is difficult to prove in this case.
“The problem is that for the Hatch Act to be violated, it would have to have been Director Comey’s purpose to influence or affect the election. You know, only Director Comey knows his purpose.”
The Obama administration doesn’t appear to agree with Reid and Painter. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday afternoon “the president doesn’t believe Director Comey is trying to influence an election.”
This in a nutshell encapsulates everything wrong with the Democratic opposition. It’s been said a liberal Democrat is someone who thinks it’s bad form to take his own side in an argument. But it’s even worse than that-even in a clear case of self defense he won’t take his own side. Why would you give Comey any benefit of the doubt about wether he was trying to influence the election-after he’d so hamhandedly influenced the election? Again, as we saw above, Schoenberg rightly argues that the Hatch Act requires officials to avoid influencing the election not being supposedly agnostic as to its outcome
Et tu Obama.
Again as we see in Chapter No Moving On there is no moving on without accountability and no accountability without the truth.